La réforme de l’opéra de Pékin [Peking opera reform] by Maël Renouard (review)

BOOK REVIEWS La réforme de l’opéra de Pékin [Peking opera reform]. By Maël Renouard. xxiv + 73 pp. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2013. Paper €5.10. No other Western country flirted as passionately with Maoism, nor was so widely seduced by the promised new start of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), as France. Bearing testimony to this are any number of cultural artifacts, from Nino Ferrer’s debonair (but wretchedly-pronounced) Mandarin in his pop hit “Mao et Moa” (punningly, “Mao and Me”; 1967), to filmmaker Jean Yanne’s viciously hilarious satire Les Chinois à Paris (Chinese in Paris; based on a novel by Robert Beauvais, 1974), about Paris under PLA occupation. Yanne’s film contains an almost convincing production of Carmen as a revolutionary ballet under the “Chinese” name of Carmeng at the Palais Garnier, and it is also towards Chinese revolutionary theater that the young author, Maël Renouard (b. 1978), turned his attention in his third novel (its length is modest enough that some would classify it as a short story), which won the 2014 edition of the prestigious Prix Décembre, and is the subject of this review. The plot proceeds with briskness bordering on recklessness. The first-person narrator begins with a Communist party intellectual, of (rather dangerous) patriotic bourgeois class background, trying to play it safe through the cultural skirmishes of the 1950s. For about a page and a half, he is assigned to Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦 (1915–1989; then leader of the Communist Youth League) to be amanuensis and censor to Puyi 溥儀 (1906–1986), the deposed emperor. Then, too rapidly, he falls under the influence of Gang of Four member Yao Wenyuan 姚文元 (1931–2005) at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and becomes one of the principal (if invisible) architects of the Revolutionary Model Operas. The protagonist’s romantic life is dispatched in a few lines with this account of a triangular relationship involving the actors in The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji 紅燈記), a central Revolutionary Model Opera: La coeur de Tang Meiyu ne cessait pas de balancer entre Qian et moi. Quand il fut jeté en prison après l’arrestation de la Bande des Quatre, elle vint vivre avec moi; elle s’en alla avec lui lorsqu’il fut libéré, sept ans plus tard. Je ne l’ai jamais revue. (pp. 44–45) Tang Meiyu [the understudy to the female lead]’s heart wavered constantly between Qian [the male lead] and me. When he [the male lead] was thrown in prison after the Gang of Four was arrested, she [the understudy] came to live with me; she went back to him when he was freed, seven years later. I never saw her again. CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 35.1 (July 2016): 56–63© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2016 DOI 10.1080/01937774.2016.1183322 Before long, the protagonist is disgraced as an associate of the Gang of Four, and he tells his story from a position of neglected dotage. The novel begins and concludes with the melancholy hope that the greatness of his works may yet be recognized in the future. The bookending phrase, “dans vingt ans, je serai à nouveau un jeune homme, un brave” (in twenty years, I will be once more a young man, a gallant man; pp. 7–8, 73), is revealed in the final paragraph to be built on a quote from Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) The True Story of Ah Q (A Q zhengzhuan 阿Q正傳; serialized 1921–1922),1 not the first time that a line has been drawn between Lu Xun’s self-deluding protagonist and the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution. What is Renouard, otherwise known for his translations of Conrad and Nietzsche, up to? And why the prize? It may be that the skeleton narrative, which reads almost as the treatment of a novel rather than the work itself, is meant to pay homage to or inscribe itself in either the spareness of the nouveau roman or else the alleged economy of Chinese writing. The constant allusiveness of the work—the protagonist’s grandfather knew Zhou Enlai 周恩來 (1898–1976) as well...